Part 1/6: The book that changed everything – a journey from Future Shock to brand responsibility

It was April 2020. The world had stopped. In the strange quiet of lockdown, I picked up a 50-year-old book (I’d originally seen on a coffee table in a photoshoot of a friend’s band) that would fundamentally reinforce how I had been feeling about marketing, psychology, and our collective well-being.

Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock” wasn’t new to me – I’d heard it referenced countless times. But reading it in that moment, when the entire world was experiencing its own shock, his words hit differently. Written in 1970, Toffler warned of “information overload” – a phrase he coined before the internet even existed. He predicted humans would face “too much change in too short a period,” leading to widespread psychological distress.

Sitting in my home office, watching the world try to process a pandemic through an endless stream of updates, statistics, and contradictions, I realised we weren’t just living through future shock – we were drowning in it.

That realisation sent me down a research rabbit hole that would consume the next five years. If Toffler was right about information overload in 1970, what did that mean for us in 2020? And more importantly – what was marketing’s role in this crisis?

The questions multiplied:

• How much content do we actually create daily? (The answer: 402 million terabytes)
• What happens to our brains under constant information bombardment?
• Why do we keep creating more when evidence shows it’s making things worse?

And now, as I wrote in my last post about AI’s capabilities and limitations, we’re at a critical tipping point. AI promises to multiply content creation exponentially. But should it? Are we using this powerful tool to amplify the very problem that’s breaking us?

These questions couldn’t be answered by marketing texts alone. I found myself diving into neuroscience papers about cognitive load, psychology research on decision fatigue, and behavioural studies on attention and well-being. Each discipline revealed another piece of a troubling puzzle.

One study showed 73% of people feel “overwhelmed by the number of crises facing the world.” Another revealed that emotional advertising – the kind that actually works – has declined by 44% over 14 years. We’d created a system where success demanded attention, but attention was becoming the scarcest resource on Earth.

The deeper I went, the clearer a paradox became: As creative quality becomes more valuable (delivering 21x profit multiplication according to recent studies), we’re creating less valuable creative. We’re trapped in a cycle where fear drives volume, volume drives noise, and noise drives more fear.

And now AI enters the scene – a tool that could either help us create more meaningful, targeted content, or simply accelerate our descent into instantly forgettable noise. We’re standing at a juncture where we must choose: Do we use these tools to shout louder, or to speak more clearly?

Perhaps it’s time to admit we took a wrong turn. In our excitement about 24/7 connectivity, about those supercomputers in our pockets that listen and learn even when we’re not actively using them, we lost sight of something fundamental. We confused constant presence with meaningful connection, volume with value.

The experiment of endless content generation has run its course. The results are in, and they’re not good – for brands or for the humans they’re trying to reach.

What started as lockdown reading has evolved into something much larger – a comprehensive examination of how brands impact human well-being in our attention-scarce world. The research led me back to a simple known fact: Less is always more, if done right.

But what does “done right” mean in 2025? How do we step back from the content arms race we’ve created? How do we use tools like AI to enhance meaning rather than multiply noise?

I’ll be sharing more about this research journey in the coming weeks, including some findings that have genuinely surprised me about what happens when brands choose quality over quantity, clarity over complexity, authority over authenticity. But I’m curious about your experience:

• Do you feel the weight of information overload in your daily life?
• Are you using AI to create more content, or better content?
• What would happen if your brand posted 80% less, but made that 20% extraordinarily creative?
• Are we ready to admit that maybe, just maybe, we need to get back to what really matters?

The conversation we need to have isn’t just about marketing effectiveness. It’s about marketing ethics in an age of cognitive overwhelm. It’s about choosing to be part of the solution, not the problem.

More to come soon.

This article draws on research from over 50 sources including System1’s Creative Dividend report, Edelman’s Trust Barometer, behavioural psychology studies, and neuroscience research on cognitive load. Full citations will be available in my upcoming research paper.